Xiaomi 13 Lite Smart Phone (Hardware)
Official GBAtemp Review
Product Information:
- Official Store: https://www.mi.com/
Xiaomi was my first mobile phone review some 18 months ago, and for the best part of that time I have now warmed up to Android devices as a daily driver. My original review for the 11T back in September 2021 was quite phenomenal, demonstrating a fierce blend of performance, battery-life, camera prowess, a solid display, and sublime media features: all powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 1200-Ultra chipset and Mali-G77 GPU.
The Xiaomi 13 Lite is Xiaomi's 2023 budget flagship device, an android phone powered by Qualcomm's SM7450-AB Snapdragon 7 Gen 1, and an Adreno 644 GPU.
On paper the 7w power consumption of the Snapdragon vs Dimensity's 10w, a full 1MB L1 cache as opposed to 32kb, and the 4nm profile as opposed to the 6nm of the 11T, you would think this latest model would blow the 11T out of the water. However, the Dimensity technically packs a +20% faster clock speed than Qualcomm's chipset with a 3100 MHz clock as opposed to 2360 MHz from the Snapdragon, but the Adreno pumps out a whopping 1698 GFloPS vs Mali's paltry 786, for the exact same 800 MHz GPU frequency.
Technical Specifications:
- Model: Xiaomi 13 Lite (2210129SG) 5G
- Display: 6.55", 120Hz AdaptiveSync AMOLED TrueColor HDR10+ display, 68 billion colours, 1080 x 2400 px, 20:9 ratio (402 ppi), 1000 nits peak, 5,000,000:1 contrast ratio
- Ram/Storage options: 8GB+128GB/8GB+256GB
- Chipset: Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 gen 1 (4nm)
- CPU: 8-core (1x A710@ 2.4GHz 3x A710@ 2.36GHz 4x A510@ 1.8GHz)
- GPU: Adreno 644
- Front Camera: 32 MP Ultra-wide with Xiaomi Selfie Glow + 8 MP Depth sensor for Bokeh
- Rear Camera Cluster: 50 MP main (Sony IMX 766), 8 MP Ultra Wide (119° field of view), 2 MP Macro
- Features: Under display fingerprint sensor, Xiaomi teleprompter, Xiaomi Selfie Glow lighting, Custom stainless steel vacuum chamber (2360mm² Heat dissipation area), Dolby Atmos®, IR Blaster
- OS: Android 12, MIUI 14
- Dimensions: 159 mm x 73 mm x 7.23 mm (171 grams)
- Battery: Fixed Li-Po 4500 mAh, rated for 95+ hrs standby, 67w charger (just 40 mins to fully charge)
A Beautifully String Yet Light Glass And Metal Device To Handle
The Xiaomi 13 Lite is a very nice phone to behold, with devilishly sleek curves, a very svelt profile and a very lightweight overall form. The device has a very minimalist, no-nonsense approach to usability too, with just one side, the right-hand side containing the three physical buttons, and the bottom of the device holding the sim slot, the speaker and the USB-C socket.
The glass and metal construction feels superb in-hand, with a solid, higher-end feel than those made from plastic, and the lightweight form factor sits nicely in your palm, but I can't help but feel that this minimalist approach has diverged my initial impressions of the Xiaomi 13 Lite. It is lavish feeling but is imperfect ergonomically.
For people such as myself, if there are a sparse amount of buttons, I want those to be in nominal places, and the overall positioning of the buttons is not entirely ideal in my opinion. As a right-handed user I can hit the individual buttons with my thumb with just one hand, but pressing the power + Volume down button together, to take a screenshot, takes a bit of a wiggle to get the positioning right. Using the device in my left hand positions the power button on my middle fingertip and the volume buttons under my index finger, which is slightly more comfortable in a way, but still doesn't feel great on the whole.
Sound Quality Is Poor But The Cameras Are Mostly Fantastic
As mentioned before the device has just one loudspeaker, and a Dolby Atmos® endorsed one at that. Unfortunately, the speaker is as flat as a pancake, and the sound quality is honestly very poor I thought. When playing movies over a network via VLC for example, I immediately had to head to the EQ settings in the app to fix the overly tinny-sounding speakers and give them some depth, but even with the most fiddly of tweaking, I could not get the device to sound in any way "media" friendly. The best solution I believe, would be to use headphones in this case, but Bluetooth ones, not 3.5mm ones, because the 13 Lite also doesn't have a headphone jack.
Thankfully the cameras are incredible in the daylight. You can tell that this device is geared towards the TikTok generation with the majority of care and attention focussed on the clarity of what you capture and how it's portrayed to others. The main 50 MP camera is exceptionally good, snapping consistently clean clear images of everything around me, and the Macro mode was incredibly fun to get up close and personal with your subject matter.
Depending on your lighting the camera feels slightly different when taking your images. On well-lit sunny days, photos look superb, but on dimmer days, the images lacked any desirable qualities to encourage you to keep them. I literally deleted as many snaps as I took some days. But luckily the bundled software on offer is quite substantial to enhance, add captions, add a custom soundtrack, and re-frame your other captures on the move!
I have to mention that images taken in night mode were noisy, undefined, and looked wishy-washy overall, so I didn't really bother using that mode much, but the Macro and selfie cameras were pretty amazing. Oddly the selfie camera features a series of filters that cosmetically tune your face in various regions such as the nose, temple and hairline, that can be adjusted to augment your face and make each individual feature imaginable more slender, larger, or more defined.
Eye tracking is incredibly clever tech that auto-magically focuses on a person's face regardless of motion and regardless of distance. You could quite easily film an action sequence for a project on this device at an astonishing level of exactness thanks to features like this. You can also track their gaze when they are wearing glasses, it really is THAT smart.
Dual video recording means that you can record out of both cameras at the same time, allowing for deeper levels of vlogging. Thanks to enhanced stabilisation you can walk and talk, recording your journey relatively smoothly, all the while recording yourself, capturing your reaction as well as the landscape, or allowing for clever picture-in-picture video interviews should you point it at a willing subject.
I really enjoyed messing with the dual video modes, using the split screen to make silly mockumentaries and poke fun at the whole process. It actually got me thinking about how useful that would be for serious vloggers and people who need this kind of technology without paying out for multiple cameras and video editing suites: this could be the perfect tool set for them all bundled into a relatively decent daily-use smartphone.
Another feature that stood out is that of the teleprompter. For this generation that constantly feel the need to narrate their entire lives but can quite always get their words out; you have a way to document your latest ideas, trends, or wacky conspiracy videos with the aid of a rolling script. No longer are you scrambling around for words, or losing your trail of thought and having to edit out dead air: Xiaomi has got you covered!
Emulation Is Hit And Miss & Game Boost Modes Are Questionable
Emulation is usable on the 13 lite, but it's definitely a little lacking in some departments. Game Turbo, or Game Space "Boost", is the software tech Xiaomi has seen fit to include in this device and all its phones this generation, though when in use I didn't notice any improvement when compared to using the device on its vanilla settings. I opted to put emulators in boost mode, favouring the high-quality mode over power saving and enhanced vibrant visuals as opposed to the original dull-looking example thumbnail, turning off all AA and AF filtering, default resolution, lowering the settings to high-speed texture filtering as opposed to high-quality: and even with the fancy UI telling me "before 67 FPS, after 121 FPS" I did not see that in effect across any emulated games I played.
As an example, I downloaded the latest nightly of Dolphin (5.0-18820) and a clean ripped CISO of Metroid Prime for GameCube I noticed decent frame rates in the opening video, but as cut scenes ramped up the action the frame rate soon dipped from 59 FPS to the low 50s, and more cluttered effects brought it down to a steady but audio-jittering 52 FPS. With the boost turned on I saw the exact same patterns of dips in the exact same places. Little to no improvement whatsoever, perhaps a few frames in a couple of places which suggests that this boosting technology is either only good for already optimised native games or is utter hokum showing entirely unrelated stats for before and after.
(Left: Highspeed texture filtering. Right: default settings. FPS: same!)
Also, the jagged edges and degraded textures caused by these settings looked abhorrent throughout. It somehow made Wii games like Super Mario Galaxy 2 look like a DS game, losing all texture smoothing and dithering that makes the game look great.
I don't understand how you can use these settings to make games look worse yet run the same, yet they cannot be used to make the game run any better.
(Opening and closing the performance graph oddly shows a lower frame rate when its closed)
I veered away from Dolphin slightly to test out AetherSX (13322-V1.4-3060), an emulator that has proven itself even on lower-end hardware, and I thought the combination of Adreno 664 and Snapdragon 7 gen 1 would at least yield some solid results, but even less demanding titles such as Time Splitters 2 ran a little slower than intended. Just the menu alone dipped to the high 30s which surprised me, so I put the phone in boost mode and, yes the same thing happened: no boost.
General gameplay on AetherSX ranged from 40 FPS in action-laden moments, and back up to 59 FPS in the calm, enemy-devoid areas. This possibly still classes as "playable" for some, but not a silky smooth experience by any means, so I would suggest that emulation on this device be limited to N64 or PSX at the very most if your view is to play the games at a solid locked FPS.
Let's be honest, the ability to run PS2 and GameCube on a mobile phone is still quite frankly mind bowing and to even have it running slow is better than nothing, but I would have liked to see the Game Boost feature actually have an impact on what I was testing. I felt like every time I opened the app drawer to see whatever the "Boost" was doing it was only at that moment that it drew a taller line on the graph and appeared to look as if kicked in, when in reality it had not changed anything, just faked a better arc on the "statistics generator".
Benchmarks Sadly Won't Set The World On Fire
Benchmarking the 13 Lite we see a single-core score of 946, and a multi-core score of 2679 which isn't going to set the world on fire. OpenGL scores of 2131 and Vulkan of 2645 also don't impress much for gaming, however, the ability to game on this phone, let alone emulate consoles, is far from its primary function, so we should bear that in mind. When it comes to daily usage, smooth UI, built-in recording and editing software and photography modes this specification is more than enough to retain a sharp experience, but it could be snappier overall.
The 13 Lite is, for all intense purposes, the latest entry-level phone by Xiaomi. The £419 early bird price tag is decent when you consider the Xiaomi 13 is £849 and the Xiaomi 13 Pro hits at £1099. The 40-minute charging speed, 90+ hour battery life and ease of use of the device are great even if the latter is a little bloated with software and games you really won't want or need, but you can mitigate this to some extent if you know what you're doing.
The cameras on this device are splendid (especially in daylight) and the ability to craft "vlog" related creations on the go, so effortlessly, is what this phone is firmly marketed towards. Xiaomi just need to strike a balance with pricing and this could be a savvy purchase for content creators, however, this is not exactly ideal for content consumers due to poor sound from the single speaker, and its relatively pointless gaming modes have proven.
Verdict
- A slew of useful Vlogging abilities
- Great cameras overall
- Build quality feels high end
- The fingerprint scanner is fast
- Only dust/splash resistant
- Front cameras could be less obvious
- No expandable memory or 3.5 jack
- Night mode could be better
- Tinny mono "Dolby Atmos" speaker is horrid
- Not great for 6th gen emulation
- No wireless charging